Monday, May 08, 2006

riving around Oakland this weekend I saw thousands of Mexican flags--the confluence of Cinco de Mayo the same week as the May Day immigrant protests led to a huge community celebration. I was at a gas station and chanced into a conversation with two Mexican immigrants--one legal, and one illegal. Because I have a passable knowledge of Spanish, they asked what I thought about the situation. My answer: it's a tough nut to crack. There simply are no easy answers.

When it comes to grid computing, people want easy answers, too. It's funny how many very educated people (like, PhD kind of people) want to know if we've found a way to take a single-threaded, monolithic piece of code and run it in parallel on many machines to make it go faster. The answer to that is, of course: no. We're not magicians, and anyone who can tell you they can do that has probably also spent time in a sphere full of water in New York.

So distributed computing isn't magic. That said, it also shouldn't be as hard as people have made it out to be.

There's been an acceptance in the industry that distributed computing is hard (and, to be certain, some aspects of it are very hard). But that has led most industry players to allow all of it to be hard. The prevailing attitude seems to be: "It's difficult stuff; you want to learn how to do it? Install the right flavor of the right version of the OS, learn Perl, spend weeks poring over the message boards, or hire some expensive consultants to do all of that for you."

But it doesn't have to be that hard. You don't need consultants to install most software--why should grid software be any different? Most systems don't prevail upon their users to learn scripting languages in order to take advantage of them--after all, most users aren't programmers. So why do all traditional grid systems rely on scripts?

This isn't to say that people who use those systems don't understand the concepts of ease-of-use. It's just not a feature they've been thinking about. I had a meeting last year with some PhD students who do work on the GLOBUS Toolkit. When they saw the Digipede Workbench (the tool that lets you design and run jobs without having to write scripts), they didn't snicker at a silly Windows tool. They said, "I wish we had one of those!"